Ah, Teletext. Many a Saturday afternoon was spent watching the football scores come rolling in on the Beeb’s Ceefax, or frantically checking page 302 for transfer news during the summer months. For those of you who think of pre-internet (PI shall we call it?) in the same realms as computer games on cassette tapes (you probably won’t know what they are), Beatlemania, or the Ice Age; Teletext was once a very relevant technology. Using about as much hi-tech jiggery-pokery as it now takes to open a can of beer, TV-types could transmit pages of information, quizzes and godawful graphics straight to your telly box, and us children of the ’80s lapped it all up.
And then, of course, digital popped along, the red-button replaced the text-button, and 8-bit drawings of Daley Thompson were a distant future. And that, my friends, should be the end of the story. However, seems like some crazy kids won’t let go without putting up a fight first: enter the good folk behind the International Teletext Art Festival.
“Is the next big word in intellectual small talk of the hip, rich and famous going to be teletextualism?” They ask. Perhaps not, but if you want to see B.A. Baracus (those who don’t remember PI will definitely have to Google him) rendered in block pixels and garish colours that send you straight back to the summer of ’88, then this event – running ’til 16th September at Berlin’s Pflüger68 – is for you. Have a Coke float on us.
© Max Capacity
© Dave Needham
© Janne Suni
© Dan Farrimond
© Raquel Meyers
© Juha van Ingen
© Jarkko RÑsÑnen
© BYM
